the remark be silly or the act
mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his
adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and
enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part
of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he
has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty,
that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write
such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a
distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an
account of our daily fortunes and behavior, we too often weave a tissue
of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more
cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too
timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw
clearly and set down unsparingly.

It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he
must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work
he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books
were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might
ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains
and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought,
although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an
ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives,
the guncotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let
some contemporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged forever
in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his terrors
by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth, he tells
about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy; but in
1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue
out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave
and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts I think
we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in,
the thought of a far-distant publicity